As the Star Trek computer used to say to Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk, “Working….” (rattles and clicks and such in the background). I’ve been working on a self-imposed project called “My Family Calendar”. If you’ve read my blog for a long time, you know that I’m not happy with Datenator, the calendar program I’m using. While it’s fairly easy to administer, it only supports regular-interval recurring events (won’t do recurring holidays like Memorial Day - the last Monday in May every year) which is a HUGE thing for me. I’d like to set it and forget it. Plus, it doesn’t include a number of other things I’d like to do. I can’t show you my on-line calendar because it’s password protected so only my family members have access.

I’ve looked at a lot of web-based calendars: WebCalendar, myPHPCalendar, phpWebCalendar, Calendarix, and a slew of others. I’ve even thought about importing my Google Calendar. The ones that do what I want also include features I don’t want like group scheduling, multiple individual calendars, to-do lists, tasks, etc. There are also those that are hard to administer and have a busy screen - too much information at once.

So after going through all of these, I’ve decided to write my own. I’m going to borrow heavily from other calendars. No sense in re-inventing the wheel, right? But what I really want to create is an address book with a calendar interface to help me with family birthdays and anniversaries. Basically here’s how I want it to work:

• It will only display a month view for the calendar.
• ONLY birthdays, anniversaries and holidays will be displayed. Because of this, all events are assumed to last all day, so no hour:minute data will be kept.
• It will allow you to click on an event (birthday, anniversary, holiday) and pop up a window with information on that event.
• The popup will contain contact information: mailing address, email, web page.
• The popup will contain a photo of the person(s).
• The popup will contain the date, but not the year.
• The popup can be printed.
• There will be an admin panel with the following functions:
  • Manage (add/modify/delete) events.
  • Set the admin password.
  • A holiday interface with checkboxes so the admin selects what holidays are displayed.
• Login and Logout of the admin panel.

Once I get these items “perfected” I’ll start adding on my wish list:

• Ability to create a PDF of the displayed month’s calendar that any user can print.
• Ability to automatically send a congratulatory email to the person(s) celebrating their birthday/anniversary, provided they have an email address in the system.
• Ability to send an email that will create a post in WordPress.
• Ability to control these items through the admin panel

Finally! I’ve been working on this theme for what seems like FOREVER! So I’m unveiling it a bit early. Here it is folks: My Iowa Spring 1 theme! Anyway, I still need to do some tweaking with it; especially where certain plugins fit in with it. I want it to recognize an use certain plugins that pertain to the display and have to write that in to certain files in the PHP programming. But it’s complete enough that I can put it out there and start using it. I hope to have the tweaks done in the next couple of weeks. After that I’ll make it available for download on my site.

Let me know what you think!

I just read a thought-provoking entry on the Weblog Tools Collection about uninstalling plugins. WordPress offers a way to “Activate” or “Deactivate” any plugins that are in the wp-plugins directory of your WordPress installation. It does not, however, offer a “Delete” or “Remove” button. Very interesting. There are database entries also that should probably be removed when you delete a plugin as well. There was one comment in particular about a plugin developer called GamerZ who includes an “Uninstall” button in the administration panel for each of his plugins. Hmmmmm. Sounds like a really good idea. Time to polish the dust off of the plugins I’ve developed and work out how to include an “Uninstall” button!

That’s right. I’ve reached 50,000 spams blocked by Akismet. Now I’ve had my blog since November of 2002 so I expect to have been hit by spams. Of course, I’ve reset the counter by only using Akismet since September 6, 2006. By February 5, 2007, Akismet had blocked 6,000 spams. By August 28, 2007, I had been hit by just under 13,000 spams. And today, December 17, 2007, that number has edged over 50,000. It’s growing and not in a linear fashion. At work, I know we block over 800,000 emails a day that are considered spam by our MailSweeper. I guess in that perspective 50,000 isn’t such a big deal. But I don’t like it. Not one bit!

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Now playing: John Cafferty - Runnin’ Thru the Fire
via FoxyTunes

Last night I completed the new theme. I’ve still got some tweaking to do, but for the most part it’s done. (I have to put it live to see some of the failures of the theme so I can find the shortcomings and remedy them. I can only test so much.)

It uses WordPress Widgets so the sidebar is easier to set up. The buttons at the top use the CSS Sliding Doors technique as described in Part I and Part II; mostly in Part II. I’ve cleaned up a lot of the CSS and removed a number of IDs and CLASSes that I really didn’t use before. I’ve completely redone how the entry fields are done when entering comments. Also, if you use the Internet Exploder, I’ve changed it so that only the “Browse Happy” graphic appears on the sidebar - no more long speech about getting Firefox, just a small graphic.

I’ll be fixing the small issues that remain in the next few days and then I’ll put it up on my wiki for download. Let me know what you think.

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Now playing: Head East - Love Me Tonight
via FoxyTunes

That’s right. It was time to switch to an autumn theme. Here’s one from the past!

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Now playing: Dada - Dizz Knee Land
via FoxyTunes

Seems like that’s all I do any more is update. WordPress updated to version 2.3. One of the nice things about WP 2.3 is that when you go to the plugins page, it shows any plugins that need to be updated… and I had quite a few of those! So, I updated plugins. Then, I found that the Headline Images plugin by ColdForged no longer worked. I’ve been using his excellent plugin for quite a while to spruce up the entry headlines. When it worked all you had to do was change the “the_title()” WordPress template tag to “the_title(’-image’)” and it took the text of the title, translated it into a graphic of those letters using any pre-determined font, size, color, shadow color, shadow offset, etc. It was really cool because you could take any font you had on your system and upload it to a folder you designate in WordPress, and it would render the titles in that font. As I said earlier, however, due to some change in WP 2.3, it no longer works.

So… I had to go with “old reliable”. I created a CSS drop shadow for the text. It’s really pretty simple. You first change the CSS of your headline class to have a z-index of 1 so it is displayed on top and its position to be relative. Then you create a new CSS class for the shadow, making the left and top margins slightly more than the headline margins, color it to be a grey of some kind, have a z-index of 0 so it’s displayed underneath, and make its position absolute. Here’s the CSS code from my stylesheet for these two elements (I also included the anchor hover class as well):

.storytitle, .storytitle a, .storytitle a:visited {
  font: italic bold 28px "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
  left: 0px;
  top: 0px;
  width: 500;
  text-decoration: none;
  color: #14220D;
  position: relative;
  z-index: 1;
}
.storytitle a:hover {
  color: #4A7032;
  background: transparent;
  text-decoration: none;
}
.storytitleshadow {
  font: italic bold 28px "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
  left: 4px;
  top: 2px;
  text-decoration: none;
  color: #889988;
  position: absolute;
  z-index: 0;
}

Then, in the “loop” of the WordPress engine, you’ll need to add one line. In the case of my theme, it’s in the file “post.php” and change the code that looks like this (I’m using curly braces instead of < and > to avoid the PHP being rendered):

{div class="storytitle" id="post-{?php the_ID(); ?}"}
  {a href="{?php the_permalink(); ?}" rel="bookmark"}{ ?php the_title(); ?}{/a}
{/div}

To this:

{div class="storytitle" id="post-{?php the_ID(); ?}"}
  {a href="{?php the_permalink(); ?}" rel="bookmark"}{ ?php the_title(); ?}{/a}
  {span class="storytitleshadow"}{?php the_title(); ?}{/span}
{/div}

That’s really all there is to it. I may even stay with this. The only drawback is that I have to use only a few certain fonts that are on everyone’s PC. Anyway, the shadows are better looking in Firefox and Opera on my Windows PC and it looks good in Konqueror on my OpenSuse laptop. It doesn’t look quite as nice in Internet Explorer (even though I grabbed the entire process from an article about drop shadowed text in IE!).

I’m working on my next theme right now. Hopefully I’ll get it done some time this weekend and post it on my wiki. Also, I’m playing with the latest Foxy Tunes add-on for Firefox. Man, it’s sweet! You can see what I’m listening to right now. I may be including this as a regular for my posts.

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Now playing: Dada - Dizz Knee Land
via FoxyTunes

Just taking this out for a test run. I’ve loaded OpenSuSE 10.2 on a laptop. I’m actually using it right now to create this entry. This is an older laptop; a Pentium M with 512 Mb (I think) and a 40 Gb hard drive. Actually, the screen is quite clear and easy to read. I also pulled in a photo (of KC and I tailgating with friends at a Milwaukee Brewers game last summer) from a USB flash drive for my wallpaper. It looks great. I’ve set the windows to be slightly transparent and I can make out the wallpaper through the windows on the screen. Very cool.

I’ve hooked it in to my server and am playing MP3 music on it. It’s also printed a document on my HP LaserJet printer that is shared off of my Windows XP computer. It was all pretty easy to set up; it took just under an hour to set it all up this way. Now I’m going out to the repository and finding some games to play on it. No, not action games like Chromium B.S.D., or Super Bubble; I want a few solitaire card games and Mah Jongg. Who knows… if I like this laptop, I may switch completely to OpenSuSE. It’s definitely as easy or easier to use than Windows.

I really can’t stay away from my website for too long. Not because I’m addicted or anything. The problem is that I get caught under a mountain of spam. Consider that right now I have 12,819 spams blocked by Akismet. That’s all well and good, because Akismet is an excellent spam blocker. The real issue here is that I’ve been HIT by 12,819 spams since I began using Akismet… and that’s not even been a year yet. I installed and configured the Akismet plugin for WordPress on September 6, 2006. So in 356 days, that means I’ve averaged 36 spams per day. And that’s not a real average. It’s been picking up momentum. It’s been growing linearly. I hadn’t checked since the last time I typed an entry and Akismet had blocked 311 spams since then… in four days… that makes about 78 spams per day blocked. Since when did I get so popular with the spambots?

Just finished updating to WordPress 2.2.1. If you’re running WordPress, go update! If you aren’t running WordPress … well, maybe you should!

Yeah, it was about time. I made a new theme. I’ll have it up on WPThemes and on my wiki soon. Don’t have the time to package it all up right now.